If the FCC wants to maintain wireless competition in America, SouthernLINC CEO Robert Dawson says, the government needs to make sure small carriers can get affordable data roaming and multi-carrier wireless devices.
SouthernLINC is one of dozens of tiny wireless carriers in the USA, known as the "tier 3s." With 200,000 users and a focus on public utilities, government, and businesses in Georgia, Alabama, and the Gulf Coast region, they've carved out a stable niche. The carrier is a subsidiary of Southern Company, a large electric utility, and started out as a way for the electric utility's workers to stay in touch.
This week, the company turned on a nationwide data and push-to-talk roaming agreement with Sprint-Nextel. SouthernLINC, like Nextel, uses the relatively unusual iDen radio technology. iDen's robustness—including an ability for the phones to work as a mesh when there's no network available at all—has helped Southern Company rebuild the Gulf Coast electric grid after major hurricanes, Dawson said.
SouthernLINC is pretty happy with iDen, but it's looking at strategies to deal with beyond 2013 when Sprint turns off its iDen network. One option is running LTE in narrow 1.4Mhz channels, a technology that MetroPCS is currently pioneering. The company doesn't need super-high data rates, Dawson says, because much of its data traffic is in low-intensity machine-to-machine scenarios like smart electric meters, rather than high-volume consumer uses.
Small carriers like those we featured in our 10 Small Carriers with Great Phones story can help provide competition in a world after the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, Dawson said. But that's only if the bigger guys don't freeze them out of getting phones or connecting to nationwide networks.
For instance, some small carriers bought 700Mhz spectrum adjacent to what Verizon and AT&T are using. But Verizon and AT&T can spec phones to only include their sub-bands, meaning the phones won't run on any other carriers. Tiny carriers don't have the market clout to demand phones built exclusively for them.
Roaming is also key for the little guys. Without roaming agreements, people won't buy their phones as the devices won't work outside of relatively small home areas. But for roaming to work, the government must mandate that it be affordable and that larger carriers hit specific milestones, to prevent them dragging their feet to eliminate small competitors.
"You can watch people that are required to do things, and it takes them a long time to get around to doing them. I could also set a price that wouldn't make it worthwhile for you to do it, so then you get the next set of delays while you argue about the price," he said.
Verizon, for its part, has been trying to deflect small carriers' complaints by enlisting them in a "Rural 4G Initiative," where Verizon licenses LTE spectrum out to smaller carriers to build 4G services. Because that spectrum is in Verizon's band, Verizon's chosen carriers would then be able to use Verizon's phones.
The downside of that move, of course, is that then Verizon gets to decide which rural carriers succeed and get phones, and which don't.
"I remember asking [CTIA president] Steve Largent several years ago, what are you going to do when this turns into a duopoly? It probably wouldn't be as much fun as it is today, but it seems to be trending that way," Dawson said.